


Joe and Spike’s Excellent Adventure

by Kitty_Highball



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV), Joe Pitt Casebooks - Charlie Huston
Genre: Crossover, Gen, WIP
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-27 03:01:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 4,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15015209
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kitty_Highball/pseuds/Kitty_Highball
Summary: Spike calls in a favour from an old...acquaintance...shall we say?





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> New York City, 1970s, the punk scene: Spike and Joe had to have met up at some point in there. The Sunnydale segments are set at an indeterminately early point of BtVS Season 2.  
> Disclaimers also fall under the category of Things that Should Be Noted: the characters and worlds of BtVS and the Joe Pitt books are owned respectively by Joss Whedon and Charlie Huston; i.e. people who are not me.

Figure that there’s no way in hell that this is a regular Van Helsing. Figure I know that cause she’s got me pinned down with a face full of someone’s front lawn and she’s fixing to ram a piece of their garden fence through my heart. Figure that, if I live through the next three seconds, I’m gonna be taking Spike for a nice little walk in the California sun. But first I’ve gotta get up. 

The stake comes down.


	2. Chapter 2

He spells it ‘vampire’. I spell it ‘Vampyre.’   He thinks I’m pretentious. I think he’s a moron. With just cause. How can someone so smart not notice that his plan has a hole that’s the size of the Grand Canyon? Go after a Van Helsing, fine. That’s why I’m here, in sunny old Sunnydale. Hauled out from my usual turf on the Island by a phone call, calling in an old debt. Suits me. Could do with a holiday. But this? This plan? Seriously. Just call the whole thing off. Debts or no debts, going after a Van Helsing who knows what they’re doing is bad news, full stop. Going after a Van Helsing who knows what they’re doing _in broad daylight_? That takes a special kind of stupidity. But then, I wouldn’t expect anything else from this guy.

“No, you idiot.” Spike sticks his hands in his pockets, looks for a light, talking round his cigarette. “You  won’t actually be outside.”

“Except for the part where I have to get from here to the house. And the part where the house has windows.” I pull out a Lucky of my own and go to light it. Spike reaches over and grabs the lighter. I make a mental note to set fire to that coat of his when he’s not looking.

He huffs out smoke in exasperation. “Look, I told you, it’s foolproof. You sneak in during the day, you hide in the basement, which _has_ no windows, wait til dark. Simple.”

“Uh huh.” I take a drag and shift my weight. Tombstones aren’t the world’s greatest seats. I eye Spike. There’s something he’s not telling me. He’s twitchy. He’s not normally twitchy. Not from what I remember. “Just like that, huh?”

“Do it,” he says. “Do it, and we’re back in the black. All evened up. Scout’s honour.”

 

_October, 1977_

“Scout’s honour,” he says, kicking me cheerfully in the spleen. “Over a hundred years old, mate. One hundred years of chaos, blood and mayhem.” He favours me with a sneer, peroxide hair haloed in florescent light. “Right now, I’m feeling generous. Piss me off again and you won’t make it to midnight.”

 I haul myself up the bathroom wall, spitting out bits of teeth, and wondering why this one, this one who’s so definitively my kind, can’t be seen in the bathroom mirror.  I could smell him four rows away, that sharp ammonia tang that blared out ‘Vyrus’ like a strip joint sign in the wrong end of town. He didn’t look like Coalition, none of that be-suited fat cat jazz. Didn’t look much like Terry’s usual brand of Society hippies neither. Definitely wasn’t gangster Hood or freaky-ass Enclave.  Had him figured for a Rogue. Waited until there was a break on-stage, followed him following a tall chick with orange hair into the bathroom. She’s still here, a broken puddle on the floor under the dryer. Her hair’s red now, and I’m none the wiser as to where this asshole comes from. Okay, I know he’s British, but that’s beside the point, because the important thing in Manhattan isn’t where you came from, it’s what turf you walk now, and what you’ll do to keep it. Some Rogues can be trusted. This one can’t.

He breaks my left kneecap with a final kick before he turns to go, and I only manage to stay up by hanging onto the counter, gritting my teeth and praying that the Vyrus starts knitting things up quickly, because this really fucking hurts.  Then I’m alone in the bathroom. Me and the dead girl. Someone else’s kill or not, I still feed before I go back out into the autumn night. I can’t afford not to.

 

_Sunnydale, the present_

“Yeah,” he says, “CBGB’s. That was a riot and a half, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I say. “Really fun. Almost as much fun as...sitting here on a crappy tombstone talking about the best way to get ourselves killed.”

“Hey.” he says. “You _owe_ me, Pitt. Don’t you forget that.”

“Oh, I haven’t forgotten.” I stub out my cigarette on a marble angel’s toe. “I still think it’s a shit plan, though.”

“But you’ll do it?” He looks suddenly, bizarrely, like a ten-year old, half malicious glee and half nervous anticipation that his plan maybe won’t work.  I think back to that first conversation, and think that what I should have said , what I should have said, leaning up against the wall, was that it wasn’t the years that counted, it was the mileage. Because Christ knows I’ve got enough of that for both of us.

I stand up anyways. “You wanna show me where this house is, then?”


	3. Chapter 3

_October, 1977, sometime later than the previous encounter_.

Whoever’s in the cupboard is making a hell of a racket. I look up at Hurley, the Society muscle who’s leaning genially against the cupboard door, holding his assault rifle like it’s his baby. Except that Hurley probably wouldn’t hesitate to eat a  baby. That’s the kind of guy he is. A big, cheerful, baby-eating Vampyre who has less brain cells than he has fingers. And he only has nine of those. He still manages to shoot straight. Some things in life just ain’t fair.

“Hey, Hurl,” I say. “Who’s in the cupboard?”

“Aw, ya know. The usual,” he says.

 I know. I also know that the usual don’t sound like they come from Jolly Olde England. That narrows the field down a bit.  My suspicions are confirmed when Terry Bird comes in.

“We caught him trespassing on Society property, man,” he says, pushing his glasses up.   “Leaving bodies left, right and center up and down the block, and then _we_ were the ones who had to clean it up.  That shit is _not_ cool. What are you doing here anyways, Joe?”

“Oh, you know,” I say. “The usual.” Actually, I’m down there to see if I can get him to lend me either twenty bucks or a pint of blood, but I figure it can wait. I’m more interested in seeing what goes down with the lying son of a bitch in the wardrobe.

The banging and muffled shouting gets louder.

Terry sighs and sits down at the table. I lounge by the door.

“Alright, Hurley,” he says.  Hurley opens the cupboard, and a thrashing heap of black leather and peroxide spills out onto the floor and gets up spitting and lunging.  Hurley absent-mindedly throws a hammer lock on him, and we wait until the visitor winds down. Hurl lets him go, and he shakes himself and begins to rant. It’s quality rant too. All British swearing and threats and ‘who do you think you are?’ and ‘do you know who I am?’ shit, like he’s some sort of royalty. Maybe he is. Like the inbred sort who wear funny hats.

“You!” He’s stopped ranting and is pointing at me.

I give him a little wave. I don’t bother to say hi.

Terry looks at me. “You know this guy, Joe?”

“We’ve met,” I say. I don’t really see any point in giving Terry the details.

He looks pained nonetheless. “You knew there was a Rogue on Society turf, and you didn’t tell me?”

I shrug. “Don’t work for you any more, Terry. Just ran into him, is all. Didn’t think he’d be around long.”  Well, it’s true. He won’t be. Not once Terry and Hurley have finished with him. You don’t have to be a fortune-teller to work it out. Me, I’m seeing a stake-out in a New Jersey parking lot at sunrise, and then a shovel to clean up the mess afterwards. Just pass me a headscarf and call me Madame Fortuna.

 But I guess I haven’t quite earned that stripey tent and crystal ball, because what  I don’t foresee is the bit where Terry and Hurley decide that someone who withholds ‘vital information’, as Terry puts it,  is as bad as an undisciplined Rogue. I only figure it out when we’re crossing the state line and something that feels like a sledgehammer (because it _is_ a sledgehammer) puts me down, and I wake up on the tarmac staked back to back with the blond fucker.

 

  _Sunnydale, the present_

“I got you out of that parking lot. I saved your sorry excuse for a non-life.”

“You got me into it in the first place,” I tell him, and wonder how many more times we’re going to have this conversation before I have to go leave for the house.  So far, including variations, it’s been four times since I pitched up last night. There’s still two hours to go.

I sigh and slouch back down onto the floor of the culvert we’re lurking in. I try to think of something else to talk about. Nothing comes to mind. We didn’t have anything in common in 1977, apart from a liking for the Ramones, and we don’t have anything in common now. Besides a debt  that’s about to be paid off. 

And I still don’t like this. There’s something Spike hasn’t told me, something about this Van Helsing, other than that they have to be stopped. Okay, so I’m not a fan of Van Helsings, professional or amateur.  All it takes is one in the right time at the right place to try for you in front of witnesses, or worse, cops, and that’s your cover blown. Doesn’t matter that the crosses don’t bother me, or the holy water. Doesn’t matter that I wouldn’t turn into dust, but just bleed out from being decapitated. They’d figure it out. When they looked at the teeth. When  they looked at the DNA. When they saw what sunlight did to the body. When they realised that we were one step up on the food chain. And that would be that. The whole underworld of Vyrus-infected freaks, all rounded up and prodded and inspected and finally packed off into camps and sunlit chambers. Because that’s what humans do with things they don’t understand, with things they fear, with things that threaten their power. One on one, you’d have a hard time taking one of us. But a full-on war, with the military and the police and the daylight all conspiring? Done and dusted within four days. At the latest.

Spike’s saying something. I tune back in and try to look like I’ve been listening the whole time.

“...invite?”

I have to give myself away. “Huh?”

“I said, how does that work, anyways, that you can get in without an invite? Doesn’t seem fair.”

I would have expected him to sound petulant, but he’s watching me, speculative, a bit wary, even.

I shrug. “Search me. Why can’t you?”

He glares.

I try to look nonchalantly cooler than thou, though the backdrop of the culvert doesn’t help, and reach for another smoke. Wish for some coffee to go with it.

Interesting question though.

“Different mutations, maybe,” I finally offer, trying to break a silence that’s rapidly becoming uncomfortable. “Being more recently infected in a different environment. Maybe the Vyrus changed when it came over here.”

“Maybe.” He still sounds suspicious.

Must have done. If it hadn’t, I wouldn’t be here now, participating in this hare-brained scheme. I lean back against the cement wall, and wonder, not for the first time, if Spike hasn’t just called me here to try and get me killed.


	4. Chapter 4

The back door of the house on Revello Drive opens easily. Which is a major bonus when you consider that the only thing standing between me and instantaneous death by cancerous, blistering five o’clock sunlight is a mangy blanket. I don’t even want to know where the stains on it come from. But the lock tumbles, the door swings open, and I am in. In and tip-toeing through the house, desperately seeking the sanctuary of the basement door, trying to find somewhere, anywhere that doesn’t have windows, because the blanket is smoking like a motherfucker, and it would be a shame to leave scorch marks all over the nice beige carpet. Not to mention charred bits of yours truly.

Only problem is, it’s hard to see the basement door through the blanket, and I’m still stumbling about the hall like a moron when the woman comes down the stairs. 

Mostly, I can just see her feet. Fluffy blue slippers. I risk raising the blanket a bit, and squint out from under it. My back has begun to peel. I see a fuzzy towelling robe, curly blond hair, a face that you can read three miles off. I know what she’s going to say before she even opens her mouth.

“Why is there a man on _fire_ in my hall?”

 So I got the words right. Didn’t get the tone right, though.  I figured she’d be scared. Figured she’d be squeaky with fright and running for the door.  Instead, she just sounds pissed off. Pissed off and disbelieving and not about to take shit from anybody.  Me, I like that in a woman, so I refrain from breaking her neck. Instead, I just smack her one upside the head and she goes down like a block of concrete off of Brooklyn Bridge. Then I haul her by the feet down into the basement with me. It’s easier once I’m out of direct sunlight, and can drop the blanket, but her head still clonks off the steps a couple of times. I feel bad about that, so when I tie her up, I make sure that the circulation’s o.k., and that her head’s propped up comfortably on a pile of old paint rags. If nothing else, the fumes’ll keep her out cold for a bit longer. Maybe give her pleasant dreams.  I move some of the shit in the basement around to make a bit more space. Then I sit back and wait for the Van Helsing.

 I wait. I smoke. I wait some more. I look at the lady to see if she’s gonna wake up any time soon, because, hey, a conversation is a conversation, even if I have to gag her when I hear the front door opening.   It takes about fifteen minutes. Then I hear coughing and groaning, and I move my feet surreptitiously out of the way, because if she’s gonna puke, I don’t wanna have to smell it on my boots all the way back to Manhattan.

“Hey,” I say, when she seems to have woken up some.

She doesn’t say anything, just looks at me. She’s scared now. Her eyes are very big, and the pulse in her neck is thumping. Lucky for her I already ate. We got take-out just before dawn. A crappy burger joint that backs onto a crappy alley where the night shift go for their cigarette breaks.

When I’m pretty sure that she’s not going to puke, I stretch my legs back out.

“So,” I tell her, “here’s the deal. You sit here, nice and quiet with me. You don’t try to escape, you don’t try to scream, you don’t do anything but sit here. In return, I won’t rip your sternum out through your nostrils. Understand?”

She nods. Licks her lips. Finally manages to get words out. “What do you want?”

I finish my cigarette and stub it out on the unfinished floor. “Lady, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

That’s about it for the conversation. I think about the amount of  time I’ve spent over the last twenty-four hours sitting in silence with someone else. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I don’t play well with others. But really, what is there to say to a woman you’ve knocked out and tied up in her own house?

“I’m not a serial killer,” I tell her, after some time, just as a reassurance.

“And what a relief that is.”

“You know,”’ I say after a minute, “the sarcastic bit’s usually my line.”

“Along with assault and robbery?”  She’s good.

“No,” I say after a minute. “I do...jobs.  For other people, mostly.”

“Who are you doing this for?”

I shrug. “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Who said I was joking?”

And again with the silence. But then she’s the one to break it. “Look, I don’t know what you want, but my credit card and my wallet are upstairs in my purse. The table, the small one, just outside the living room? That’s original New England craftsmanship.  You can-“

“Lady,” I tell her, “ Do I look like an antiques dealer? I got enough stuff of my own, I don’t need to haul around other people’s shit.”

“Joyce,” she says after a minute.

“Huh?”

“My name is Joyce.”

“Hi, Joyce.” I think for a minute, then figure it won’t do any harm. “I’m Joe.”

“Hello, Joe.”

We have a moment of uneasy truce. On her part, the cause of the unease is pretty obvious. On my part, it’s coming more from a growing suspicion that Spike _really_ hasn’t told me everything about this deal. The house was supposed to be empty.  I look at my watch. It’ll be dark soon.  I think. I think some more. I think that pooling your information with your hostage is kind of a stupid thing to do. Think that maybe it’s my kind of stupid.

“Joyce?” I say.

She looks at me.

“You believe in vampires?”

“What?”

I show her my teeth. 


	5. Chapter 5

I have to give her credit; she doesn’t scream. I’m liking Joyce more and more.   She shuts her eyes tight and takes a couple of deep breaths.

“This isn’t happening. This isn’t happening. I did not just see.. fangs. You have fangs.”

“Uh huh.”

“Oh my God. Ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod ohmy-“

I knock her out again. There’s only so much of that a guy can take.


	6. Chapter 6

I hear the front door slam upstairs, then a kid’s voice shouts hello and more voices and footsteps clomp on by.  They’ve either gone into the kitchen or gone upstairs. I give it a minute and listen to the sounds of the house. Check my watch. Seven o’clock means it’s definitely dark out. Joyce is still out cold. One of her slippers has fallen off, so I put it back on her foot before I ease up the basement stairs and slide the door open. Van Helsing or no Van Helsing, I’m leaving. Fuck this. There’s random women and children all over the place. Ten to one, Spike is just trying to get me picked up by the cops for some bizarre petty reason known only to his twisted brain.  Fuck, he’s probably phoning them himself from round the corner. The sooner I get out of suburbia, the better. 

I decide to try for the back door. I make it as far as the kitchen. There’s three of them, riffling through the cupboards and leaving milk out all over the island. They can’t be more than sixteen or seventeen and they look about twelve to me, in fuzzy sweaters and flannel shirts and running shoes. The red-haired girl and the boy see me first and freeze open-mouthed. The blonde keeps talking from somewhere behind the refrigerator door.

“-because it’s not like I don’t already have enough to worry about between failing chem and stupid Spike and stupid Snyder and Giles panicking over five hundred different signs that the end is nigh. Although if the end really is nigh, then that would kind of-“

“Buffy?” The other girl interrupts her, her voice gone high with fear.

“-mean that Snyder-“ The blonde girl slams the refrigerator door shut and stops in mid-sentence. 

I’m about to explain politely that I’m just leaving and then my brain catches up with my ears and I do my own version of a statue.  She said ‘Spike’. The blonde girl mentioned Spike. That can only mean one thing.

“Aw _fuck_ ,” I say, and then she comes across the room and hits me harder than Hurley on a good day, and any thoughts I had pertaining to the fact that I don’t kill children are knocked out all over the hall carpet along with a back molar, and I kick back and knock her into the clothes tree, which is a stupid, stupid thing to do, because she reaches up and fucking _breaks off_ a piece of it and comes at me again with her insta-stake, and I only manage to dodge it at the last second by back-handing her into the boy and they go down with a crash. I make it to my feet and hold the red-head off by just planting my hand on her forehead and keeping her at arm’s length. You’d think that someone that short would have figured out that I’ve got the reach on her, but, hey, she’s a teenager. They do stupid things as part of their job description.  I let go of her head without warning and she face-plants at my feet. I feel an absurd urge to apologise.  It passes when the blonde roundhouses me into the newel post. I’m busy getting familiar with the floor again, when something grabs me by the scruff of the neck and hauls me up.  For a minute, I can’t believe it’s the blonde girl. She’s only about the same height and weight as her friend, who’s scrambling up with the help of the boy. Then she hits me again, and I believe it.  I think I even say ‘ow.’ There are definitely stars. I lash out anyways, and when the stars clear, I’m busy propping up the wall and the girl’s picking herself up out of the wreckage of what used to be Joyce’s New England table.

We stand there for a minute, facing each other, eyeing each other. She still looks like she’s about twelve. I wonder if she’s waiting for me to make the first move. I think that a curveball might be the right approach.

“So you’re the Van Helsing,” I say.

“What?”  She looks bewildered and more than pissed off.

“Most Van Helsings are men.” I pick a splinter of newel post out from my wrist with my teeth and spit it out. “The last one I met was older than you though. In his fifties. English guy. Not much of a runner. You, you look like you could out-run me if you tried, and believe you me, I don’t say that often.”

“What are you talking about?”

“So you’re not the Van Helsing? The phrase ‘vampire hunter’ isn’t ringing any bells?” Then I have a thought. “Don’t tell me it’s your mom, cause I just spent a good hour and a half hanging out with her and that would _really_ be embarrassing.”

She looks like she’s counting to ten and making it to three. “ _What_ have you done to my mother?” She starts towards me.

“Nothing.” I jerk my thumb at the basement door.  “She’s fine.”

And when the girl gets close enough, I twist sideways from the punch that she throws at my face and get her in the same head lock that I’ve seen Hurley use almost every day of my non-life, and I hang on as we go staggering and reeling through the hall and out the front door to where Spike is waiting.


	7. Chapter 7

The first surprise is that Spike’s not on his own. There’s a Lucy with him, one of those Victorian nightgown types who float around the scene misquoting Keats like an Anne Rice reject and swooning every five seconds. She’s swaying about all over the lawn, and if I trample her when the girl hauls me sideways off the steps, well, that’s her own damn fault. The second surprise is that Spike actually goes and picks her up. He even coos.  In my armpit, the blonde stops struggling to watch. I look down at her. She looks like every other teenager I’ve ever met forced to witness PDA by people over twenty-three, irritated and revolted. Spike’s back is still turned towards me and the Lucy is whining and pouting.

The blonde starts struggling again.

“Hey,” I shout. “Any chance of a hand here?”

There’s no answer, but then I don’t really expect one. It’s getting harder to hang onto the girl. I decide that between the cooing and the pouting, someone here deserves to get staked, and it’s not going to be me.  So I adjust my grip. I get the girl by the scruff of her sweater and the back of her jeans and I hoist her off the ground. I’m not the world’s biggest guy, but I’m bigger than the girl  and I’ve got an audience. That always calls for some grandstanding.  The other kids are standing on the porch, uncertain and tense, not sure whether they should be helping their friend or keeping an eye on the fanged Harlequin scene being enacted considerably closer to them.  I shut one eye and gauge the distance. The blonde does something unpleasant  to my solar plexus and shins simultaneously, and I decide that I don’t really need to gauge the distance after all. We’re going for force here, not finesse. 

And it’s a good throw. I catch my breath, my hands on my knees, and watch the girl go through the air like a classic slider, heading straight for Spike’s head.

The Lucy sees her coming and wails, flailing her hands.

Spike turns around.

In the split-second before the blonde girl hits them, I wish I had a camera. And then they all go down in a pile of snarling thrashing limbs and teeth, and I turn my back on them and start walking. That’s me. That’s my half of the deal done. I brought the Van Helsing out; now she’s all Spike’s.

Something that smells like pizza slams into  me side-on, and something fuzzy attaches itself to my face when I hit the dirt.  I can hear the boy’s voice, frantically gabbling, “Stake, Willow, stake!” He’s sprawled on the grass beside me, leaning on my shoulders to keep me down.

“I can’t find it!” The red-head is scrabbling through a backpack with one hand. Her other hand, bundled into her sweater cuff, is squished flat against my mouth. I award her one point for ingenuity: cover the vampire’s mouth, and he can’t bite you. I take away one point for the fact that her hand is too small and that she really needs to put more weight into it to make it work. I sit up, spitting angora threads, and punch the boy off. I don’t really have the heart to punch the red-head as well, even though she’s found the stake. She just sits there, looking like a rabbit, clutching the stake like it’s an ice cream cone.

I gently push her over backwards onto the grass and get up, only to go face first into the azaleas as the struggling mass of Spike and the kid with the weird name – Bunny?- slam into my back, and I trip over Spike’s girlfriend’s dress and nearly impale myself on the white picket fence as I go down. Again. Fuck I hate suburbia.


End file.
